Prime Time Living 9.24.25 - Flipbook - Page 12
12 A Special Advertising Section of Baltimore Sun Media Group | Wednesday, September 24, 2025
HEALTH
Women and Heart
Disease 2025
By Margit B. Weisgal, Contributing Writer
F
act: Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of women, causing one in four
deaths each year. It’s a fourth of our mothers, sisters, friends, neighbors, coworkers and more. Fewer than 44 percent of women are aware of this. However,
either women or their cardiologists (or both) chalk up the symptoms to less life-threatening conditions such as acid reflux, the flu or normal aging.
“We clearly have a lot
of work to do to make
women aware that heart
disease is a bigger threat
to their health than all
types of cancer
combined.”
— C. Noel Bairey Merz, M.D.
In 2019, I wrote an extensive article on
heart disease in women. Women tend to
be more concerned about breast cancer
that affects one in eight women versus heart or coronary artery disease that
affects one in four women. Breast cancer benefited from heavy promotion by
the American Cancer Society and the
Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.
Awareness also came from the fact that
most women have friends who have had
breast cancer. So detection and survival
rates went up. We don’t hear about those
with heart disease because they die.
For that article, I spoke with three eminent female cardiologists. Now, six years
later, I thought there would be more information, more knowledge, more care for
women with heart disease. But let me
back up and describe how women and
heart disease was treated.
Behind the Scenes
We have to go back to the 1920s
when “diseases of the heart consistently
ranked as the No. 1 cause of death in the
United States. Even the President was not
immune to this emerging health concern:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of hemorrhagic stroke in 1945 due to uncontrolled
hypertension (high blood pressure), raising
awareness about the rising toll of cardiovascular disease.
Driven by the need to understand this
growing threat, the Framingham Heart
Study (“Framingham”) was started in
1948 by the U.S. Public Health Service
and transferred shortly thereafter to the
newly established National Heart Institute
(now the National Heart, Lung and Blood
Institute [NHLBI]) of the National Institutes
of Health [NIH]). In 1976, one finding
was that heart disease risk was found to
increase in women after menopause.
The study has not only contributed
enormously to our understanding of the
natural history of cardiovascular disease
and stroke, it also enabled us to identify
their major causal risk factors.
Then something interesting happened.
Thanks to all this research, heightened awareness of the risk factors, and
improved care, the incidence of heart disease in men declined. However, starting in
1984, researchers noticed that although
male deaths decreased, women’s deaths
from heart disease were increasing, creating an ever-widening gap.
“Sadly,” says Dr. C. Noel Bairey Merz,
“this continued until two events took place
that changed the dynamic. In 1991, the
National Institutes of Health, the world’s
largest biomedical research institution,
appointed Dr. Bernadine Healy, a woman
and a cardiologist, to head it. And, that
same year, she launched the Women’s
Health Initiative (WHI).”
For the first time, women’s specific
health issues were studied separately from
men. Subjects included strategies to prevent heart disease along with breast cancer, colorectal cancer and osteoporosis,
all of which affect women and are major
causes of death as they age.
On June 10, 1993, the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) passed the
NIH Revitalization Act of 1993. The
Revitalization Act was a historic moment
for women’s health research, mandating
that women and minorities be included
in all NIH-funded clinical research and
that Phase III clinical trials be analyzed
